Let us guess – you would love to improve better in BJJ, but you simply don’t have enough time? Sure enough, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu isn’t “everything” in your life; you have your family, your job, your friends… So how in the world are you supposed to add in more training sessions? But here’s the thing. No matter how busy you may be, claiming that you don’t have enough time for BJJ – more specifically, for making adequate progress in it – is just an excuse.
Nick “Chewy” Albin explained why this is the case in an interview for BJJ Eastern Europe and why being focused will solve many problems:
Really, it comes down to focus. Claiming “I don’t have enough time” is just an excuse. And honestly, if you’re not happy with the way your life is structured, you need to work in order to change it.
Here are some of the things that have helped me with being productive on and off the mat:For BJJ, when I train, I have a technique or a position goal. I’m actively working towards something. If you asked my students right now, they’d tell you I was working on taking the back from as many places as I can.
Having a focused goal on using a technique or position is a helpful way to improve. It keeps you focused on an area and you also get the benefit of seeing tangible results. If a technique did not work last month but now it’s working, you’ve gotten better and you have some form to measure that by.
He also went on to explain the importance of better using your time, which you can do by simply turning off your phone:
Get away from your phones. For as much as I am on social media with the businesses and everything, I’m not on there that much. I get on to see what I want to see and get off. A lot of the time during the day my phone is in airplane mode or I put my phone out of my reach so I don’t scroll mindlessly.
Chewy emphasized the necessity of structuring your life in a conscious, deliberate manner:
Going back to structuring your life. It’s something people don’t really think about much. We think about how we want our training to look, we structure our meals. We think about how we want to arrange our homes, etc. But so few people seem to focus on what they want their day to day life to look like.
If you’re not happy with the way it looks currently… Change it. It won’t happen overnight. But it’s like your training on the mats. Slow incremental steps turn into a big change overtime.After you figure out what you want things to look like, you should make daily and weekly routines for yourself to follow. Almost like a template for your day to day life.
Whatever is essential to making your life look the way you want (whether this is your BJJ training, weight lifting, personal life, anything), turn it into a daily habit. Make it so that if you miss one of your daily actions, you feel off like you didn’t brush your teeth or something. Having my daily training and life habits has been helpful with keeping me focused even when I’m super busy.
Interested in learning more from Chewy, the man behind the Chewjitsu YouTube channel? Then read our full interview with him here.
